How To Get Someone To Commit Long-Term



Have you ever been stuck in “relationship limbo”? If you have, you know how much it sucks . . . 

But how can you find the people who are actually ready for commitment, and increase the odds of them wanting it with YOU?

The truth is, there are actually people who—like you—are working on themselves and looking for a true relationship. And in today’s new video, I’ll show you how to avoid the time-wasters and game-players . . . and I’ll also reveal the #1 trait that makes someone want to get serious.

Be sure to watch the whole thing (and stay until the end to hear about a brand-new free training happening this month that you won’t want to miss!)

I am so excited to get into today’s subject. It’s about commitment. I have a lot to say about this today. My stuff has evolved a lot over the years in this department, so be ready for this.

Before I do, I wanted to announce something really special that is happening this month that you get to be a part of. It is an event I am doing on the 23rd of January called The First Principles of Getting Commitment. Anyone out there who wants 2024 to be their year for getting the commitment they have always wanted, whether it’s from someone you already have or someone you’re out there looking for, you should be there. It’s going to be a powerful one-hour event. It’s completely free. It’s not about to be repeated. So mark your diary right now—the 23rd of January. Go to LoveLifeTraining.com for all of the details. You can register in 20 seconds, and I’ll see you on that date.

This video is all about commitment, so here we go.

Are you looking for a real commitment in your life? Are you sick and tired of casual dating, hookups, people who don’t text back, people who flake, or in some ways, the most dangerous people: the people who take up months or years of your life in a dynamic that keeps you in limbo and never actually turns into anything serious? How do you find the kinds of people who are ready for a commitment? When you find one of them, how do you date in such a way that they end up wanting commitment with you?

I said once on my dear friend Lisa Bilyeu’s podcast, Women of Impact, that you shouldn’t try to sell a car to someone who’s in the market for a bike. It’s hard enough to sell someone a car who wants a car. Like, I’m in a Honda dealership and I’m trying to convince you that you want a Honda: “Don’t go to Ford. Hondas are great.” Imagine walking up to someone on the street and trying to sell them a car when they don’t even want a car. You’re trying to sell them a Honda and they’re going, “But I don’t want to drive. I’m not sure I even want to drive. I really like my bike.”

And what I meant by that was, if you continuously go through life trying to sell a relationship to someone who fundamentally does not believe in relationships, you are wasting your time. But we know in life, it’s not as binary as people who really want a relationship and people who don’t believe in them. There’s an awful lot of people in the middle who are perhaps on the fence about a relationship. Maybe they’re intrigued about a relationship, but they’ve got some stuff that makes it hard for them to get into a relationship. Maybe they’re still working through some things. Life can be complicated. And everyone knows someone who’s married to a person who at first wasn’t entirely sure what direction they wanted to go in, maybe dragged their heels a little bit in the early stages, and eventually ended up in a committed and happy relationship.

My question in this video is: How do we make sure that if we ever come across someone who is trying to figure out if commitment is the right thing for them, or if this particular commitment with you is the right thing for them, how do we become someone who makes them want it with us?

One of the things that I hear over and over again is this belief system that men don’t want commitment anymore—men especially. They just don’t want commitment. And I feel like I almost have to champion the idea that men do want commitment, at least a decent portion of men. And this is anecdotal, but from a lot of what I’m seeing out there, there are more and more men who are actually listening to a rhetoric of “commitment or marriage or having a family is a really good thing.” And I don’t mean that they’re just hearing that from women who are talking about it. They’re also hearing about it from men that they respect.

One of my dear friends, Lewis Howes, has a podcast, The School of Greatness. Lewis has an enormous audience of men who value his opinion, who respect him for the messages that he espouses. And one of the messages that Lewis has been espousing for some time now is the value of a happy and peaceful relationship, and how much that has done for his life, and how much more he feels he can achieve within a relationship like that.

I’ve seen many Type A people—many of them are friends of mine—who have not only found a relationship but found more happiness through a relationship and are now very vehement about the idea that they achieve more within a relationship . . . even if you’re just looking at it through a Type A lens of men looking for the root that allows them to actualize and be the best they can be and achieve the most that they can.

And, of course, not every man is like that. But even if you were looking at that kind of man, many of them are now looking at marriage or family or just a long-term relationship through the lens of, “I will actualize in this relationship more than I would if I were spending a lot of time and energy being single and constantly dating.”

So you have a world now where, more and more, there are men who are looking for advice, who are looking for wisdom. By the way, side note, I always get told, “Matt, all of us women are listening to you, but where are all the men who are trying to grow? Where are all the men who are listening and doing self-growth work?”

There are a lot of them. There are a lot of different podcasts and YouTube channels aimed predominantly at men around growth. Now, not all of them are ones that I agree with where the messaging, I think, is a very positive one for men or has a very positive view of women. But that’s a whole strand of its own. There’s a lot of advice out there for men that is very beautiful advice on how to become the best men they can be. And so much of that advice revolves around finding an amazing partner.

So men are hearing this, and I say this, I suppose, just as a kind of pressure valve for you not to feel like you are out there on your own, convincing the men you date to want a relationship that, prior to meeting you, they didn’t want.

Having said all of that, I am the last person, given my history of having listened and watched on the front lines of dating for 15 years, who would argue that commitment isn’t an issue right now in our society. That there aren’t a huge number of people who don’t want commitment. That there hasn’t been a real cultural effect of the amount of options people perceive themselves to have now that dating apps are the primary way that many people date, and they have this apparent buffet of options. That there isn’t a kind of fetishization of the freedom that can come from being single or the perceived freedom that comes from being single.

Of course, you’re contending with all of that. But the belief that no one wants commitment these days, and that the kinds of guys who are valuing the idea of a relationship aren’t out there, itself becomes harmful and self-fulfilling.

One of the core principles of commitment that people miss: It’s not just that you have to go into a relationship believing it’s a good thing for you. Of course you believe it’s a good thing for you. You already do. That’s why you want a relationship. It’s more than that. You have to believe that a relationship would be good for them. And I don’t mean try and persuade them that it would be good for them. You have to believe yourself that it would be good for them. Because if you go in with that belief, the way you talk about relationships won’t be coming from a place of selling anymore. You’ll be coming from a place of believing.

Early on in my relationship, Audrey, my partner—my wife now—she would talk about relationships as this stunningly beautiful thing. She would talk about them as something that was an incredible thing to be a part of—that commitment was a very beautiful thing. I had reservations early on—not about Audrey, but about a relationship in that moment. I was like, “I just don’t know.” I was one of those people who was on the fence. Now, Audrey didn’t try to sell me. What she did was state her beliefs around a relationship and how beautiful a relationship was in her mind.

If you don’t believe it’s a good thing for them—if you think you’re trying to sell them something that ultimately is a less exciting, less free, more high-maintenance life for this person, then somewhere along the way, you’re going to pass those insecurities on to that person.

If we believe that, for the other person, they’re going to get much more out of life by being a team with you, that they are going to have beautiful freedoms, that they aren’t going to lose all of their freedoms, that they are going to be able to achieve extraordinary things, that it’s not going to hold them back from their dreams . . . in fact, it’s going to propel them even faster toward their dreams, that they’re going to have the kind of support system they’ve never had before in their life, that they’re going to have the kind of partner they’ve never had before in their life . . . when you believe that, and the way you talk—indirectly or directly—communicates that, this person, who can get the message because not everyone can get that message, but the kind of person who can get that message is actually going to receive it.

Now, of course, when the person in front of us gets to a point of believing that a relationship would be a good thing in general, the next question is: “Why with you?”

Now, we can’t make someone want anything, but what we can do is influence. And the greatest way to influence is through our character.

Many people over the years have come to me looking for a tactic when it comes to commitment: “What one message can I send? What one thing can I say that is going to get the commitment I want?”

The things I’ve given for that in the past have worked for a lot of people, but they work when they’re on the back of character. What do I mean by that? If you have not been showing the right things or not been demonstrating the traits that someone wants long-term in their life, and then all of a sudden, you come to someone with an ultimatum, that ultimatum is just a tactic, and it’s kind of a hollow one. You say, “You do this or I’m gone. If you don’t commit now, I’m gone.”

Now, that person may panic into buying what you’re selling. They may suddenly say, “Yes. Okay, fine, I’ll be in a relationship with you.” And that’s going to get a short-term result. It’s going to get a quick win. But that win isn’t going to last, because three months from now, that person may be sitting there going, “Why do I have this gnawing feeling in my stomach that I’m somewhere I don’t want to be or that I didn’t choose this?” Because people want to feel like they’re the one making the call, not that they’ve done it under duress. People want to decide. People stick with things they feel like they decided on for themselves, not things they were made to do.

If it wasn’t based on deeper character traits he thought “I can’t live without,” that ultimatum is just a tactic.

So we have to get away from tactics and into the things that maybe are a little slower but the results are more real. And the thing that creates that effect is character. Do you have the qualities that someone says, “I want to be around these for a lifetime”? Do you support someone in ways that they think, “My God, I would never want to live without this support again”? Do they feel like the way you celebrate their dreams and who they are as a person is something they take so much from that they know they would never find it as good as that anywhere else? Do you have disagreements in a way that is incredibly productive, and kind, and compassionate, and is a kind of conflict resolution that they’ve never experienced before? Because I’ll tell you now, most people, in their previous relationships, have experienced very toxic conflict and have never experienced healthy conflict, healthy disagreement. So when they experience it for the first time, it’s like this breath of fresh air. It can even be very disorienting because they’re like, “I don’t know what to do with this.”

These are the things that show character, and when we show those things, it doesn’t mean you’ll get a result today. It might be a month from now. It might be six months from now. But someone will slowly begin to realize that what you provide, what you bring to their life, is something that they would not want to live without. And that’s not just true of people you continue seeing. It’s also true of people you have to part ways with for now. With those people, it may take them a few weeks or months to process how much they’ve lost, but oftentimes, they will process how much they’ve lost, and you’ll find that they come back to you because they realize just how incredible you were as a human being and just how foolish they were to let you go.

So that idea of character over tactics is one of the first principles of commitment. And, of course, I’m talking in general terms here. There are lots and lots of different ways to show character in those ways once you get into the weeds of how to have that kind of disagreement with people that’s really productive and compassionate and kind. There are lots of things to say about how to make someone feel seen and echo back to them what you’ve seen in a way that makes them feel uniquely understood by you. There are lots of ways to support someone’s dreams and show yourself to be an incredible teammate.

But the principle is what I wanted to get across in this video, and I have more principles like this. What I wanted to do is, instead of making a 12-minute YouTube video, in which I can’t possibly get across everything I want to say, I wanted to put together a one-hour session for you.

For anyone who is listening to this going, “I’m sick and tired of tactics when it comes to dating and when it comes to trying to get commitment—of having to feel like I have to play some game to get someone to want me or to get someone to want a relationship. I just want to understand on a deeper level how I can set myself up for success so I don’t waste any more time on time-wasters/people who ultimately will never commit, and I certainly don’t want to lose someone who is capable of committing, but I just didn’t understand the right way to show up early on in the relationship or in the dating process,” this is for you.

What I’m going to be talking about over this hour are the first principles of commitment, and the way I’m thinking about this is if you ignore every other YouTube video I’ve ever made about commitment, but you just watch this one hour, you’ll have everything you need to know to go out there and get different results.

This event is not going to be a paid-for event. I’m putting it on completely free, and it is taking place on January 23, 2024. We are going to have thousands of people showing up for this from all over the world, and I’m inviting you to join us.

All you need to do to register is go to LoveLifeTraining.com. It will take you 20 seconds to register, and then I will see you on the 23rd of January.